FEATURE:
The Way Things Are
Fiona Apple - When the Pawn... At Twenty-Five
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I want to mark the approaching…
twenty-fifth anniversary of Fiona Apple’s second studio album, When the Pawn… That is the short title of the album. Its full title is When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts He Thinks Like a King What He Knows Throws the Blows When He Goes to the Fight and He'll Win the Whole Thing 'fore He Enters the Ring There's No Body to Batter When Your Mind Is Your Might So When You Go Solo, You Hold Your Own Hand and Remember That Depth Is ... I am not sure why she wanted such a long title, though it does definitely make it stand out! Her follow-up from 1996’s extraordinary debut, Tidal, I think that When the Pawn… is her best album. It contains my favourite Fiona Apple song, Paper Bag. Although the album has received some mixed reviews – NME gave it 5 out of 10 -, it has gained a lot of retrospective love and new respect. Trying to fit into the scene in 1999, When the Pawn… was like nothing else. This remarkable young songwriter who had this lyrical voice that buckles the knees. A singular spirit and phenomenally engrossing artist. I think that When the Pawn… is one of the best albums of the late-1990s. I am going to get to a couple of reviews before finishing off. In 2019, Rolling Stone reflected on an album where Fiona Apple faced down her critics. Songs of anger and resilience that have endured through the years and inspired a whole new generation:
“If you’re looking for a statement of intent on Fiona Apple’s second album When the Pawn…, which turns 20 on Saturday, it’s right there in the opening of the second track. Over the steadfast piano plunks and rolling drums of “To Your Love,” the then-22-year-old takes aim at her detractors by invoking their own taunts towards her work: “Here’s another speech you wish I’d swallow/Another cue for you to fold your ears/Another train of thought too hard to follow/Chuggin’ along to a song that belongs to the shifting of gears.” It was this mix of sophisticated pop writing and unabashedly juvenile needling – devoting an entire verse to quoting your haters – that made Apple both an annoyance to critics early in her career and a folk hero to her legions of young fans.
In 1999, Apple was three years – and three million album sales – removed from her debut, Tidal, an album she recorded at age 17. That LP arrived with powerful, is-that-really-just-a-teenager? vocals and forceful lyrics; Apple once said that her songwriting stemmed from penning argumentative letters to her parents. It’s no wonder that precocious teen girls, longing for the final say in a world eager to dismiss them, gravitated towards adolescent torch songs like “Sleep to Dream” or “Shadowboxer.”
Grown-up critics admired the jazzy, traditionalist sound and plush moodiness of Apple’s output, but when her directness extended outside of her music, public perception of the young artist began to sour. Even as Apple was expected to deliver autobiographical, minute-by-minute detailing of her pain within her lyrics, they also expected her to be a mere vessel for that pain, delivered as the cool, meek girl behind the piano. The matter-of-factness with which she addressed sexual violence in songs like “Sullen Girl,” coupled with her forthright approach in interviews, triggered a kneejerk reaction from largely established, largely male writers, who enjoyed pointing out the contradiction between her blunt, blistering attitude and her shrinking stage presence almost as much as they enjoyed referring to her as “waifish.”
It all came to a head during her infamous “this world is bullshit” speech at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards, derided at the time as a tantrum from a spoiled brat who knew nothing of the celebrity culture and exploitation that she was criticizing. Around the same time, Mark Romanek’s provocative music video for “Criminal” branded her as a doe-eyed sex symbol to be gawked at — a “Lolita-ish suburban party girl,” as the Times put it — despite her having little say in the project. (She hadn’t known, for example, that her whole wardrobe would be nothing but lingerie. “It ended up working [for the song], because it was a sexual video and I got everything that I wanted,” she would say of it in 2005. “But then I didn’t feel good. I actually did feel like a criminal after that.”)
Following a Spin cover story that featured photographs by (who else?) Terry Richardson, Apple flipped open a copy of the magazine on tour to find a whole page of negative letters directed towards her. This, she has said, was the final straw, and she responded in typical fashion, writing a breathless poem that would become her next album’s title:
When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts He Thinks Like a King / What He Knows Throws the Blows When He Goes to the Fight / and He’ll Win the Whole Thing ’Fore He Enters the Ring / There’s No Body to Batter When Your Mind Is Your Might / So When You Go Solo, You Hold Your Own Hand / and Remember That Depth Is the Greatest of Heights / and If You Know Where You Stand / Then You Know Where to Land / and If You Fall It Won’t Matter Cuz You’ll Know That You’re Right
In the days before Instagram monologist Caroline Calloway, this seemed like the most self-absorbed block of text you could unleash on your audience. Nowadays, post-Tumblr and post-Livejournal, Apple’s poem reads as comparatively lucid, once you get past its posturing, I’ll-show-you exterior. Apple herself pegged it as more of a letter to herself than towards her detractors, a self-help “reminder” of how to push past criticism even as it got uglier and more ridiculous. (And it did: Spin later ran a story in which poetry professors and linguists delivered navel-gazing analyses of the title’s meaning.)
Across its 10 songs, When the Pawn is more outward-facing and self-aware than its predecessor, daring to go on the offensive while reserving Apple’s harshest critiques for her own tendency to self-sabotage. Even so, she relishes in her ability to grapple her way towards adulthood in public. “I don’t know what I’m doing, don’t know, should I change my mind?/I can’t decide, there’s too many variations to consider,” she intones on opener “On the Bound,” in a sing-song voice that only grows more nonsensical as she shows off her syllabic prowess: “No thing I do don’t do no thing but bring me more to do/It’s true, I do imbue my blue unto myself, I make it bitter.” Later, on “A Mistake,” Apple takes on shades of her “Criminal” persona, threatening to make bad choices “on purpose” and “have fun while fumbling around.” But when she admits to “always doing what I think I should,” she reveals that this is a manifesto of a perfectionist with her hands tied, wanting desperately to get loose for once.
Apple’s vocals on these songs abandon the oceanic smoothness of Tidal, and while they’re nowhere near as jagged as on later works like The Idler Wheel, it’s thrilling to hear her enter that rock & roll register while still working in the structural mold of Tin Pan Alley and Paul McCartney. A song like “Limp” demonstrates a full-throated anger that Apple previously didn’t seem capable of.
On top of that, the word “crazy” appears in no less than three tracks on When the Pawn, a self-explanatory reclamation of a slur against Apple and her female contemporaries. Two of those songs went so far as to be singles. At first glance, “Fast As You Can” is an upbeat warning to future partners, with its scurrying tempo changes and high-wire bravado. Yet with it comes the sneering, uncanny line “You think you know how crazy/How crazy I am,” sung like she’s trying to prove it to you.
On “Paper Bag,” the boastfulness in the way Apple delivers “I went crazy today” remains one of the more sardonically funny moments in a song full of them. (An all-timer: “He said, ‘It’s all in your head’/I said, ‘So’s everything,’ but he didn’t get it.”) The elaborate musical production of its video, directed by Apple’s then-boyfriend Paul Thomas Anderson, would make Stanley Donen proud, but it only heightens the disconnect between the song’s optimistic melody and the way its lyrics drain out desire like tub water by the end. Apple told the Washington Post that when choosing how to sequence When the Pawn, she measured the amount of hope found in each track; for the listener, those varying degrees of buoyancy are more ambiguous. With her frank and often jarring references to her own mental state, Apple leaves you guessing as to whether she finds validation in “the beast” that “blooms” inside her.
When the Pawn both highlights and navigates its own melodrama with the help of Apple’s producing partner, Jon Brion, who’d already collaborated with singer-songwriters like Rufus Wainwright and Aimee Mann. Working over piano and vocal tracks recorded by Apple – using lyrics and rhythms she’d written entirely on her own – Brion added baroque flourishes to the album that imbue it with just enough manic energy while never losing sight of the woman at its center. With a small group of session musicians, Brion could embellish the “To Your Love” chorus with an electric piano that sounds downright menacing, or a see-sawing guitar on “The Way Things Are” that conflicts with Apple’s insistence on moving forward. Through it all, there’s always that propulsive, insistent piano, reminding you always that Apple’s instrument of choice belongs in the percussion family.
“I think I have figured out what I’m good at,” she allegedly told Brion when they began working together. “I write pretty well, I’m a good singer, and I can play my songs well enough on piano. You’re good at everything else. So I think that’s how we should proceed, and if we are ever off-base, I’ll let you know”.
Prior to getting to an amazing review from Pitchfork, Albumism celebrated twenty years of When the Pawn… A great feature from 2019 that offers new perspectives on one of the most accomplished and individual albums of the 1990s. One of the all-time best in my opinion. I hope that people who might not be aware of Fiona Apple pick this album up. The more I listen to it the more I get from it:
“With musician/producer Jon Brion in her corner, Apple delivered an album that confronts the murky truth of love and relationships, the glorious highs and the heartbreaking lows, as well as a journey of discovery and the hidden sides slowly revealed as the newness of a relationship gives way to the realities of its existence.
Apple’s songwriting prowess is front and center throughout “When The Pawn…,” with many sessions recorded with her at the piano as the starting point. Then with that firmly drawn sketch, Brion would embellish and accent the details with his own multi-instrumentalist skills and those of a key group of musicians. The result elevates Apple’s performance, solidifying them without overshadowing them. It also gives the album a sonic consistency, like you are sitting in on one session rather than a sporadic collection of performances.
Opening with “On The Bound,” the music is stalking, almost foreboding as Apple growls, “You’re All I Need” in a spiraling overture to acceptance and taking a leap of faith and trying, at best, to surrender to the anxiety inducing power of love. There’s a maturity and complexity at work in the arrangements on the album that reward the listener.
Themes range from impassioned longing for acceptance (“To Your Love”), codependency and abusive relationships (the strikingly bold “Limp” with its own comeuppance), relationships with expiration dates (the delicately haunting “Love Ridden”), the letdown of belief and hope (the lyrical twist held in “Paper Bag”), resignation (“The Way Things Are”), and the clarity when things are all said and done (“Get Gone”).
The power of the album is in the off-kilter arrangements and zig-zagging melodies that thread through each song. They keep you a little on edge as Apple owns and exorcises her emotional demons with pure candor. It can be brash. It can be confronting. It can be alarming. But it is always engaging.
She’s doing things on her own accord and embracing them. Her honesty is never to paint herself as victim or as hero, never to self-aggrandize. Instead she presents the emotions and complexity of her position in a way that offers access and empathy, and even an occasional wry smile. Her lyrics are like diary scrawlings, presenting what many may think but dare not say.
She’s also maturing and pushing against the expectations laid at her feet. She won’t be tarred and feathered by others, or have her caricature be a paint by numbers for the critics. As she owns in the alluring “A Mistake,” she is more than happy to “do another detour / unpave my path.”
And that she does. With gusto. It’s what makes When The Pawn… such a compelling listen. One worth returning to often”.
There are other incredible features like this that I would urge people to read. Before getting to a final review, Pitchfork from 2019. They went properly in-depth for Fiona Apple’s second studio album. They commended the razor-sharp, diamond-cut writing that “mines the depths of her psyche and emotion":
“Fiona Apple started writing in order to more effectively argue with her parents. As a kid who’d been identified as troubled and sent to therapy, she struggled to make authority figures see her side of conflicts. “So I’d go back into my room and I would write a letter and an hour later, I’d come out and read it—‘This is how I feel’—and I’d go back into my room,” Apple recalled in a 1999 Washington Post interview. “I would love the way that it felt to have your side of an argument right here in front of you. If I wrote a letter, I didn’t even need to win an argument.”
In this, as in so much else, she was precocious. Great art has been motivated by that same impulse to correct the record—to impress a divergent worldview on those who’d prefer to ignore it, whether that audience numbers two or, in the case of Apple’s first album, 1996’s Tidal, three million. That remarkable debut contained rejoinders to a fickle lover, a rapist, and anyone foolish enough to write off Apple because she happened to be young or small or female. As a hip-hop fan, Apple understood the power of a boast. In its bluntness, Tidal also functioned as a preemptive act of self-defense from a person already accustomed to being misunderstood.
A legion of new fans, many of them girls younger than Apple (who was 18 at the time of the album’s release), understood her messages of individualism and resilience instinctually. But her candor didn’t exactly prevent the press or the public from judging her harshly; though her notorious “this world is bullshit” speech at the 1997 VMAs constituted a cannier analysis of celebrity culture than most people in the entertainment industry wanted to admit, its messiness suggested that she was still a more eloquent writer than speaker. By the time she started composing her second album, Apple had a reputation—as a bitch, a brat, a heroin-chic waif and possible anorexic, a performer who, according to The New York Times, “plays a Lolita-ish suburban party girl” on TV but comes on more like a “shrinking violet” in concert. It was hers to shake off, or at least to reshape on her own terms.
Although When The Pawn is, on its surface, a suite of 10 songs that dissect embattled loves and unhealthy desires, demonstrating the impossibility of maintaining romantic relationships when you’re always at war with yourself, the “you” to whom Apple addresses so many of her lyrics isn’t necessarily singular. Female singer-songwriters are generally presumed to be memoirists, but Apple has always maintained that the songs on this record were composed without any specific, personal incidents in mind. Often, she could just as plausibly be speaking to a derisive, judgmental public.
The first clue that she was looking outward as well as inward is in the 90-word poem she chose as the album’s title:
When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts He Thinks Like a King What He Knows Throws the Blows When He Goes to the Fight and He’ll Win the Whole Thing ’Fore He Enters the Ring There’s No Body to Batter When Your Mind Is Your Might So When You Go Solo, You Hold Your Own Hand and Remember That Depth Is the Greatest of Heights and If You Know Where You Stand Then You Know Where to Land and If You Fall It Won’t Matter Cuz You’ll Know That You’re Right
Dismissed at the time as a meaningless ploy for attention, the poem is in fact pretty legible (despite the mixed sports metaphors) as a pep talk to a vulnerable person who’s gearing up to defend their unpopular truth in public—and, inevitably, get pilloried for it. Apple composed it on tour, after paging through reader responses to a 1997 Spin cover story, with photos by Terry Richardson and slobbery physical descriptions to match, that had painted her as a pretentious, melodramatic pill. “I had just sat on the bus and there’s Spin with Bjork on the cover and I picked it up and there were all these terrible letters in reaction to my story—‘She’s the most annoying thing in the world, etc,’” she recounted in the Post profile. “And I got so upset, I was crying, and I didn’t know how to make myself go on, make myself feel like it was all going to be OK.”
But she did go on, by pushing back against her public image with blunt self-analysis. Released on November 9, 1999, When the Pawn isn’t a carefully constructed self-portrait so much as an aura-photo that captured a snarled psyche untangling itself with a fine-tooth comb. The narrator’s mistrust of happiness threatens an all-consuming romance in opener “On the Bound.” On “A Mistake,” over cymbals and synthetic boops that suggest an emergency without resorting to siren samples, Apple’s voice builds urgency as she confesses, “I’ve acquired quite a taste/For a well-made mistake/I wanna make a mistake/Why can’t I make a mistake?” Yet what begins as self-destructive rock cliché transforms into a lament about the not-exactly-punk qualities of conscientiousness and perfectionism: “I’m always doing what I think I should/Almost always doing everybody good/Why?
In place of the bravado of Tidal’s “Sleep to Dream” and “Never Is a Promise,” there is Apple’s keen understanding of the effects her intensity can have on others. And it doesn’t seem like a fluke that this theme is most pronounced on the singles. A jittery, syncopated sprint that plays up the nimbleness of her smoky alto, “Fast as You Can” famously taunts, “You think you know how crazy/How crazy I am.” It doubles as both a warning to a lover and a reclamation of a slur that had followed Apple throughout the publicity cycle surrounding her debut—one that has been used to dismiss willful female artists since the beginning of time. Years before pop culture got serious about authentically depicting mental illness, the song likens her inner struggles to sharing a body with a beast that could never be defeated or appeased, characterizing that fight as a process of “blooming within.” (In 2012, Apple began speaking publicly about her experiences with OCD.)
“I went crazy again today,” she sings in “Paper Bag,” the Grammy-nominated single that may be the most fondly remembered track on When the Pawn. It’s Broadway meets the Beatles in its triumphal horn blasts, but as the melody grows ever bouncier, the words increasingly counter that levity with disappointment. The lyric starts out all stars and daydreams and doves of hope, before dispelling those pop song illusions to reveal the grim reality that the man Apple desires sees her as “a mess he don’t wanna clean up.” She’s never had trouble laughing at herself, and “Paper Bag” hinges on a sly reference to her own solipsism—“He said ‘It’s all in your head’/And I said ‘So’s everything’/But he didn’t get it”—that drags the singer and an uncomprehending public at once.
The song is emblematic of an album that broadened Apple’s fragile, mercurial image not just with self-awareness, but also by expanding her sound beyond the jazzy, beat-backed piano ballads of Tidal. When the Pawn’s producer Jon Brion (whose baroque arrangements had recently created context for the dateless, scene-less voices of Rufus Wainwright and Aimee Mann) intuited that her style was distinctive enough to absorb other elements without losing cohesion. Still, even in his own estimation, he tends to get an outsized share of the credit for the record’s innovations. In a conversation with Performing Songwriter, Brion clarified that its unusual rhythms—namely, the time-signature shifts in “Fast as You Can”—originated with Apple’s songwriting. “In terms of the color changes, I am coordinating all of those,” he said. “But the rhythms are absolutely Fiona’s.”
It was, in fact, Apple who dictated that division of labor. Brion recalled her beginning their collaboration by playing an almost fully realized When the Pawn on the piano, then telling him plainly: “I write pretty well, I’m a good singer, and I can play my songs well enough on piano. You’re good at everything else. So I think that’s how we should proceed, and if we are ever off-base, I’ll let you know." With that in mind, he recorded her vocals and piano first, sometimes simultaneously, then added other instruments with help from a deep, impressive roster of professional session musicians. Despite mixing diverse sounds and styles, Brion’s arrangements cohered, giving the album a darkly romantic texture that overrode the clichés of any one genre.
When the Pawn was, if anything, more frank in its descriptions of physical intimacy than Tidal had been. Yet the later album avoided exploiting Apple’s sex appeal in quite the same mode as that first album’s witty and widely misunderstood song “Criminal,” whose seductive slink and infamous video nonetheless resembled innuendo-laden ’90s teen pop more than anything she’s put out since. Apple’s new approach to sexuality was aggressive to the point of being fearsome. “I’m not turned on/So put away that meat you’re selling,” she growled in “Get Gone.” The frenzied chorus of “Limp” evoked gaslighting, sexual assault, and the public’s predatory voyeurism at once: “Call me crazy, hold me down/Make me cry; get off now, baby/It won’t be long till you’ll be lying limp in your own hands.”
With the leverage of an artist whose first album had gone triple platinum—and a brilliant collaborator in her boyfriend at the time, filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson—Apple also exerted control over the way she presented herself in music videos. A production number that had her dancing with besuited boys in a goofy reverie, Anderson’s clip for “Paper Bag” struck a blow against her morose reputation. In “Fast as You Can,” she wipes a foggy window until the camera can see her clearly. Most striking, “Limp” situated her in a home as dark as the one in “Criminal”; she puts together a self-portrait puzzle but fails to locate the piece that would complete a word scrawled on it: “angry.” In the final seconds, she stares down the camera as she spits out, “I never did anything to you, man/But no matter what I try, you’ll beat me with your bitter lies.” Every video in this series challenged the way viewers thought of Apple; “Limp” went farthest, implicating everyone outside the frame who would attack a well-intentioned stranger for sport.
By 1999—a year dominated by rap-rock, teen pop, Smash Mouth, and Santana’s Supernatural—her singularity was apparent. (So devoid of Apple analogs was the pop landscape at the time that author and Rolling Stone critic Rob Sheffield allowed himself a rare overreach: “In a way, Apple’s music is a spiritual sister to the angst-ridden rap-metal of Korn and Limp Bizkit.”) In retrospect, her real peers were artists like Erykah Badu, the Magnetic Fields, Lauryn Hill, and Cornershop, unclassifiable songwriters who blended old and new styles into something timeless. As Entertainment Weekly framed it in their When The Pawn review, “the seemingly nonstop blur of young acts swamping the charts and MTV’s ‘Total Request Live’ does make one occasionally yearn for performers with—how to put it delicately?—longevity and substance.”
It would take two more stunning sui generis albums (2005’s Extraordinary Machine and 2012’s The Idler Wheel…) to usher in the rise of pop feminism, and a more open, informed public conversation about mental health to convince the wider world of what sad teen girls had known since 1996: that Fiona Apple is far from crazy. But When The Pawn was so good it forced her detractors to take her seriously anyway, earning their grudging acclaim and launching the opening salvo in a fight she’d ultimately win. “What I need is a good defense,” Apple had pleaded on “Criminal.” Three years later, she’d become her own best advocate”.
I am going to wrap up very soon. Before I do, there is another review that I want to highlight. AllMusic were full of praise for Fiona Apple and When the Pawn… Although most critical prefer Tidal, I think that When the Pawn… is a stronger and more enduring album. One that I come back to more than her debut:
“Fiona Apple may have been grouped in with the other female singer/songwriters who dominated the pop charts in 1996 and 1997, but she stood out by virtue of her grand ambitions and considerable musical sophistication. Even though her 1996 debut Tidal occasionally was hampered by naiveté, it showcased a gifted young artist in the process of finding her voice. Even so, the artistic leap between Tidal and its long-awaited 1999 sequel When the Pawn Hits... is startling. It's evident that not only have Apple's ambitions grown, so has her confidence -- few artists would open themselves up to the ridicule that comes with having a 90-word poem function as the full title, but that captures the fearless feeling of the record. Apple doesn't break from the jazzy pop of Tidal on Pawn, choosing instead to refine her sound and then expand its horizons. Although there are echoes of everything from Nina Simone to Aimee Mann on the record, it's not easy to spot specific influences, because this is truly an individual work. As a songwriter, she balances her words and melodies skillfully, no longer sounding self-conscious as she crafts highly personal, slightly cryptic songs that never sound precocious or insular. With producer Jon Brion, she created the ideal arrangements for these idiosyncratic songs, finding a multi-layered sound that's simultaneously elegant and carnival-esque. As a result, Pawn is immediately grabbing, and instead of fading upon further plays, it reveals more with each listen, whether it's a lyrical turn of phrase or an unexpected twist in the arrangement; what's more, Apple has made it as rich emotionally as it is musically. That's quite a feat for any album, but it's doubly impressive since it is only the second effort by a musician who is only 22 years old”.
On 9th November, we mark twenty-five years of Fiona Apple’s When the Pawn… I recall when it came out in 1999 and how different it was to anything else. I was sort of aware of Apple but was compelled to dig deeper when her second album arrived. It is a stunning work with no weak moments. In fact, nothing less than stunning. If you have not heard the album before then please do. Twenty-five years after its release, When the Pawn… highlights how we need to…
BOW to the queen.